We’re really getting into this online booking mallarky here at EdinburghMenus.com HQ. We’ve already added the ability to book tables online at restaurants in Edinburgh using toptable.co.uk and 5pm.co.uk. This is great as not only do you not need to pick up the phone to book a table (good for when you’re at work!), but you also get to take advantage of the special offers toptable and 5pm.co.uk have negotiated.

The only slight problem with booking through toptable and 5pm is that they are a middle man - they contact the restaurant on your behalf and you get confirmation of the booking a little later. This works well and 99% of the time there is not a problem, but wouldn’t it be perfect if you could get immediate confirmation that your table is reserved just as surely as if you phoned the restaurant yourself?

Well now you can! You know how lots of restaurants have fancy electronic reservation systems that manage all of their bookings? We’ve teamed up with one of the companies providing that service to lots of Edinburgh restaurants to provide an instant online booking system that immediately saves your booking into their reservation system, making it impossible for your table to be reserved for anyone else. This system works really nicely, and is currently in use by some of Edinburgh’s busiest and most highly regarded restaurants like Vittoria, La P’tite Folie, The Stockbridge Restaurant, Creelers and Britannia Spice.

New special offers section

As a number of the restaurants that use our direct online reservation system also have 5pm and toptable offers, to stop the listing pages getting too cluttered with options for how to book your meal, we’ve moved a lot of the offers off the main part of each listing page - they’re now listed down the side of the page. To make up for this, we’ve created a whole new special offers section. This also allows you to easily see only the businesses that currently have special offers running and you can also list them by proximity to any location in Edinburgh. We think this is going to be a popular feature!

We’ve got another exciting partnership to tell you about today - it’s now possible to book tables online at over 80 restaurants in Edinburgh on EdinburghMenus.com through toptable. This is great news - toptable is the largest online restaurant booking service in Europe and sports big names such as Alex Ferguson and Gary Rhodes amongst their shareholders.

Along with the partnership we already have running with 5pm.co.uk, it’s now possible to book online at almost every restaurant in Edinburgh that has an online booking facility from EdinburghMenus.com. All the businesses where it’s possible to book a table online have been tagged with “bookonline” so they can be searched for easily or if you just want to see all the toptable businesses, they’ve been tagged with “toptable” too.

A few of the toptable businesses also have special offers available when you book online. We’ve been getting our hands dirty with SOAP (hahaha) to pull in these toptable offers using their API as we do with the 5pm offers. So you can browse all the available offers from toptable and 5pm without leaving the comfort of EdinburghMenus.com! There’s loads more we can do with toptable’s excellent API (like checking for table availability) and we’ll incorporate this into EdinburghMenus.com when we get a chance.

Sorry - it’s been a while since our last post - but we’ve been busy, as always, of course! We’ve got a pretty exciting new feature to tell you about today, and there a few others coming soon that are still being worked on…

If you’ve heard of 5pm.co.uk, you’ll know that it’s a great place to look to book a table at a restaurant in Edinburgh at a knock-down price.

The title of this post is just a joke - we never intended to be a direct competitor to 5pm, who provide a full table booking service. Our emphasis is on reviews and information on restaurants in Edinburgh. So in order to increase the amount of information and the usefulness of EdinburghMenus.com, we have teamed up with 5pm.co.uk making it possible to see restaurant offers from 5pm on EdinburghMenus.com and click through to their site to book a table online.

There are currently 74 restaurants in Edinburgh with 5pm offers. All restaurants with 5pm offers have been tagged “5pm” so you can easily track them down on EdinburghMenus.com. Want to see French restaurants with 5pm.co.uk offers near the Omni Centre? Try this. Or All 5pm offers near the Kings Theatre? Try this.

We hope you find this service useful. We’ll shortly add an offers section to the site so you can see a variety of offers available from 5pm.co.uk. If you have any comments on it, as always, just leave a comment here or contact us directly.

Ok, it’s hardly a Transformers Ultimate Bumblebee toy or a Nintendo Wii, but our incredibly exciting Christmas present to our users is the ability to add an image to your account. Now other visitors to the site can see an image of your ugly mug (or whatever else you want) beside any reviews on the site. Depending on the image this choose, this feature has the ability to make your reviews look more or less trustworthy…

Just now the image you upload to go with your profile must be in jpeg format. The image will be automatically resized and cropped to 120 pixels square.

If you choose not to upload an image, rather than assigning you an image of a silhouette of a person or a question mark as other websites do, there will just be no image. This is a much more polite way of doing things, if you ask us.

Merry Christmas!

One of our favourite features on EdinburghMenus.com is the ability to add a sketch to your review. It’s a bit of fun that makes reading reviews on the site more entertaining. We thought it would be fun to allow you to see exactly how people drew the sketches that people draw to accompany their reviews. This information has always been stored in our database but in the past has only been used to create the final image that you see on the site.

But not any more! Now, when you see a sketch beside a review, you can click on it and the canvas will clear and the sketch will redraw itself, exactly as its creator did originally - errors and all. Pretty pointless, but fun!

For the techies among you, this feature is brought to you by Adobe Flash and the jQuery JavaScript library. If you don’t have Flash and JavaScript enabled, you’ll still see the final static version of the sketch.

And so the sketch feature further extends its lead as the least used feature with the most development time spent on it…

Some users on EdinburghMenus.com have written literally dozens of reviews now. As you’ll already know from our previous post, we love stats! So we’ve improved the profile pages for all of our users to include a little graph showing how many reviews they have left for each level of rating. Clicking on any bar in the graph will show only reviews left by that reviewer with that rating.

We also added a few extra stats in there about average number of words per review and stuff. While we were in there tinkering around with the profile pages, we organised it all a bit better so you can immediately see that user’s latest reviews and their favourite businesses. It was a bit rubbish before, if we’re going to be honest!

A good way to see the improved profile pages in action is to look at the profile page for our most prolific reviewer, jwjlewis.

Statistics are great, no matter how misleading they may be at times.

There is an ever increasing amount of data on the EdinburghMenus.com database and we thought it would be interesting to generate some statistics based on that wealth of information.

The statistics page currently shows information about members like who has written the most reviews, the longest reviews and who is considered the most trustworthy by the system.

Statistics about businesses show which businesses have the most reviews, where has been rated highest and where the lowest. The statistics for best and worst rated businesses only take into account businesses with more that 2 reviews. Once there are more reviews on the site this will be changed to show only businesses with more than 5 reviews, to make the results more reliable.

To see all this in action, visit the review statistics page.

Regular visitors to EdinburghMenus.com might not have noticed anything new features added to the site in the last couple of weeks.

But don’t despair! We’ve been working hard behind the scenes doing things that you won’t notice immediately. We’ve been optimising and streamlining the code that runs the site which will enable us to add new features more rapidly in the future.

There has been plenty user activity on the site though, as usual. In fact, we recently passed the 300 review mark. That means that since we launched the site at the end of June, there have been an average of almost 5 new reviews per day on the site! Thanks a lot to all our reviewers!

With so many reviews now on the site, there are a number of businesses with multiple reviews. By default, reviews are shown below a listing with those written by the most trusted reviewers first. To help you sort through all these reviews, it is now possible to reorder the reviews by date or rating as well. To help you guage how trustworthy a review is, we have also added the trust rating for each user in brackets after their name. You can find out more about the EdinburghMenus.com moderation and trust rating system in our previous post.

Well, we thought that we’d already made searching for restaurants and takeaways in Edinburgh about as easy as it could get.

Not according to Mystic. He’s been a keen EdinburghMenus.com user since our launch and he suggested that we create a Firefox search plugin so that he can search EdinburghMenus.com without actually going to the site first.

So we did. To add the EdinburghMenus.com search plugin, while on any EdinburghMenus.com page, just click the little dropdown beside the search field at the top of Firefox and select Add ‘EdinburghMenus.com’. Try it right now. You are using Firefox, right?!

Job done.

Now you can search for a business name or type of business and it will load up the results page just as if you’d entered the term into the “What” box on the EdinburghMenus.com site. If you want to see businesses near you, it will also accept an EH post code.

Have you ever tried using the internet on your mobile phone? It’s useful to be able to do it, but it’s not the most enjoyable experience. Even on the most modern handsets using browsers such as Opera Mini 4, the fact is, most websites just weren’t designed for a postage stamp sized screen — thank goodness!

We know that when you’re out and about, you’re not going to be interested in adding reviews, signing in to your profile or editing any listings on the site. You just want information, and quickly!

That is why we’ve produced EdinMenus.com, a lightweight version of EdinburghMenus.com designed specifically for mobile phones. The site features the same quick and easy search of the full site, as well as full business listings, reviews, menus and even maps. The maps aren’t as fancy as the interactive GoogleMaps on the full site, but they serve their purpose!

We were going to give the mobile version of the site an address like mobile.edinburghmenus.com, or edinburghmenus.com/mobile but thought we’d save your thumbs a bit of work and register EdinMenus.com. Those other addresses will feel just fine though, if you want to give your flabby thumbs a workout!

If you have to pay for your internet usage by the kb, don’t worry — the EdinMenus.com pages are written in super efficient code so you can rest assured that every kb of data you download contains the maximum amount of Edinburgh restaurant and takeaway information!

Oh oh oh! Almost forgot! As you’re likely to be on a phone when using EdinMenus.com, we figured it might be useful for you to be able to phone the businesses that you find while using the site. So we’ve turned each phone number into a special link so that you can just call them immediately. There’s also a “save” link beside each phone number that will add the phone number to your phone’s phonebook with the name of the business as the name. Yeah, pretty clever, huh?

You can find out a bit more about EdinMenus.com on our about EdinMenus.com page where there is also a mockup of a mobile phone so you can see roughly what it will look like on a mobile device.